US Trying to Use
Same Trick on Saddam

it Used on
Milosevic

by Robert Fisk

Dissident Voice

October 4, 2002

It's the same old trap. Nato used exactly the same trick to
ensure that it could have a war with Slobodan Milosevic. Now the Americans are
demanding the same of Saddam Hussein – buried well down in their list of
demands, of course. Tell your enemy that you're going to need his roads and
airspace – with your troops on the highways – and you destroy his sovereignty.
That's what Nato demanded of Serbia in 1999. That's what the new UN resolution
touted by Messrs Bush and Blair demands of Saddam Hussein. It's a declaration
of war.

It worked in 1999. The Serbs accepted most of Nato's
Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-government in Kosovo, but not Appendix 8,
which insisted that "Nato personnel shall enjoy ... free and unimpeded
passage and unimpeded access throughout the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia."

It was a demand that Mr Milosevic could never accept. US
troops driving through Serbia would have meant, in these circumstances, the end
of Yugoslav sovereignty.

But now we have the draft UN resolution which Presidents
Bush and Blair insist the UN must pass. Arms inspection teams, it says,
"shall have the right to declare for the purposes of this resolution ...
ground and air-transit corridors which shall be enforced by UN security forces
or by members of the UN [Security] Council".

In other words, Washington can order forces of the US (a
Security Council member) to "enforce" these "corridors"
through Iraq – on the ground – when it wants. US troops would thus be in Iraq.
It would be invasion without war; the end of Saddam, "regime change",
the whole shebang.

No Iraqi government – even a Baghdad administration without
the odious Saddam – could ever accept such a demand. Nor could Serbia have
accepted such a demand from Nato, even without the odious Slobodan. Which is
why the Serbs and Nato went to war.

So here it is again, the same old
"we've-got-be-able-to-drive through-your-land" mentality which forced
the Serbs into war and which is clearly intended to produce the same from
Saddam.

America wants a war and here's the proof: if the United
States truly wished to avoid war, it could demand "unfettered access"
for inspectors without this sovereignty-busting paragraph, using it as a second
resolution only if the presidential palaces of the Emperor Saddam remained
off-limits.

Saddam can open his country to the inspectors; he can open
even his presidential palaces. But if he doesn't accept the use of
"Security Council" forces – in other words, US troops – on Iraqi
roads, we can go to war. There's also that other paragraph: that "any
permanent member of the Security Council may request to be represented on any
inspection team." In other words, the Americans can demand that their
intelligence men can return to become UN inspectors, to pass on their
information to the Israelis (which they did before) and to the US military,
which used them as forward air controllers for their aircraft once the
inspectors were withdrawn.

All in all, then, a deal which President Saddam – yes,
Saddam the wicked, Saddam the torturer, Saddam the lover of gas warfare – could
never, ever accept.

He's not meant to accept this. Which is why the
Anglo-American draft for the UN is intended to give us war, rather than peace
and security from weapons of mass destruction.

Robert
Fisk is an award winning foreign correspondent for The
Independent (UK), where this article first appeared. He is the author of Pity
Thy Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (Atheneum, 1990)